Funeral procession, Fu Min township, Yunnan, China

Funeral procession, Fu Min township, Yunnan, China

Boy Playing On Street, Fu Min Township, Yunnan, China, January 2010

Boy Playing On Street, Fu Min Township, Yunnan, China, January 2010

BBC Beijing Olympics theme

The BBC’s station identifier for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, animation produced by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz, using the classical Chinese adventure novel Journey to the West as its theme.
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Beijing Olympics torch relay

The rolling PR disaster that has been the global torch relay for the Beijing Olympics is in Australia at the moment for a run around the nation’s capital, Canberra. I had piece in the Canberra Times about it today.

When the Beijing Olympic torch relay runs through Canberra, it does so as an overloaded symbolic event, preempted by global news reporting in which protests and counter-protests have dominated the relay’s image-making.

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

From this implausible start, the torch relay has not functioned effectively as spectacle, like the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games that can dazzle and overwhelm their spectators. Instead, the effect has been to produce a symbolic event in which the symbolism is untethered by real history, and as such is free to be appropriated and disrupted by the prevailing politics that circulate around it.

Of course, as a single, unifying symbol, the Olympic torch should work well as an object whose multiple meanings can be juxtaposed and overlaid by governments, the Olympic organizers and and the rather forlorn and forgotten corporate sponsors to achieve a wide range of political, ideological and marketing effects. But in the era of 24 hour news and sophisticated global protest movements, those meanings have been harder to control than the promoters might have hoped.

For the Olympic organizers, athletes and relay runners, the torch has increasingly hopelessly tried to represent the Olympics, and while it is in Canberra, our “Australian heroes” and their participation in the games.

For the Tibet and human rights movements around the world, the Beijing Olympic torch has simply represented the Chinese state, and has become a legitimate object of political action on that basis. The sometimes violent protest actions around the torch relay over the last month have played out as an allegory of the real violence and struggles for power within China between the state and those who oppose it.

The actual Chinese state, meanwhile, has clearly hoped to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global presentation of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both to signify an Olympian Chinese national triumph.

So the torch relay has been presented by China as a tracing across the globe of its ascendancy. As a symbol of power the torch is legitimized by being taken to the sites of power of the countries it visits – to Downing Street, the Arc de Triomphe, and in Australia to Canberra and past Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial.

In symbolizing power in this way, those who hold the torch have struggled to define its meaning on their own terms or in their own interests. Cheering on our Australian heroes cannot compete with China self-consciously signaling its return as a global superpower. This has produced the heated public debate and hand-wringing, including participant withdrawals and protest actions, that have characterized some of the relay legs. In others, it has only been the heavy hand of the host states that has prevented trouble.

The overburdening of the torch with meaning has made Chinese indignation at its uneasy reception around the world somewhat disingenuous. The Chinese organizers have not helped themselves, either, with the deployment of Chinese state paramilitary cadets as “torch attendants”. Their cheery blue tracksuits have taken on a rather sinister quality and they have presented the world’s media with striking, but exactly the wrong, images. In London especially, the behaviour of these young men in front of 10 Downing Street showed a gratuitous disregard for the significance of their location, hinting by their unthinking presence at its centre of government at a symbolic violation of the very national sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

The Australian prime minister, whose own symbolic antennae are nothing if not sensitive, ruled out the presence of the torch attendants in the Australian leg, although the results of that remain to be seen. However, since the early protests in London, international Chinese communities not officially connected to the Chinese government have been mobilizing to support the torch as it travels around the world.

In this political movement, the meaning of the torch has become the “sacred flame of the motherland”, leaving behind any bounded connection to the Olympic games in a general sense. It has come to represent China as an historical and civilizational meaning, woven into the century-long narrative of China’s struggle to define a post-imperial modern national identity, with a symbolism possibly beyond even the control of the Chinese government. In the rhetoric of this new movement one can hear echoes of Chinese nationalist movements going back through the Diaoyutai Islands protests of the 1970s, the May Fourth movement in the 1920s and even the 1905 Anti-American boycott.

In Australia, Chinese students have been traveling to Canberra for the relay out of a fervent sense of duty and pride. Their nationalism may leave many Australians uncomfortable, although our own can be equally humourless and forceful.

Any person who chooses to identify him or herself as Chinese has much to be proud of in this Olympic year. The historical achievements of China’s magnificent civilization have immeasurably enriched the human experience, while its current economic and social transformations are offering an extraordinary release of creative potential for the world. But for no good reason for a country in which all its citizens have access to some level of education and lots of media, China remains resolutely undemocratic, with a government that ultimately has no limits to the means it can use to maintain its power.

Australians are right to think about China’s future, and the Beijing Olympic torch relay in Canberra will highlight those concerns in our national discourse. But symbolically weighed down as much as it is, a stylishly-decorated aluminium torch being taken around Canberra will never be able to express the richness and complexity of a relationship with China that is and needs to be fully cultivated in scholarship, politics, the economy, culture and a shared social life.

 

China Week

I have been in Melbourne at my alma mater, Monash University, for a series of events over the last couple of weeks. It included me giving an updated presentation of the BBC China Week seminar from the project I started in 2005. The BBC’s China Week is the gift that keeps on giving. Back then I edited a montage of the BBC’s version of China, which I have uploaded here. Requires Quicktime 7.

Making noodles in Shanghai

Making noodles in Shanghai.

Another view of Shanghai

Another view of Shanghai from a few weeks ago.

Waitan

A view of the Waitan, or Bund, in Shanghai.

Shanghai and sci-fi

On Tuesday, I presented a lecture at Birkbeck College in London, which was followed by an appropriate amount of a rather nice rioja, and my book, Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity, was released in the US. Next week, a few days in Shanghai on my way home to Australia for Christmas. Here is the abstract of the lecture.

The discourse of China in cultural production, politics and scholarship can privilege an ahistorical past in its ideological projection of China’s classical civilization and timeless rural subjectivities. However, this discourse elides its highly temporalized nature, with a multiplicity of intersecting and countervailing narratives of China’s past and present transformations. The temporality of the discourse of China has been brought into relief by its current economic boom, which has produced expressions both within and outside of China not of Chinese “traditions” but of Chinese futures.

This seminar examines the material expression of China’s future in the Pudong development area in Shanghai. Via Jameson, it uses the metaphor of science fiction to argue that Pudong is a “technoscape” which displaces our understanding of contemporary China by operating, like sci-fi, as a temporal extrapolation from the present into a potential future. That projection remakes how we know China, on the basis of its possible future as Pudong.

However, the way of knowing China inferred from Pudong is structured in terms of power and replete with specific values and effacements. From its active erasure of earlier Communist imaginings, it presents a vision which looks, on the literal surfaces of its glass and steel structures, like a familiar globalized and corporatized instrumental future. Yet, in Pudong’s abstruse excess of space and scale are the politics of the party-state and an extravagant self-consciousness. The seminar suggests a Chinese future is being made in Pudong as a dissociative collage of the material of global modernization, expressing new forms of power relations in contemporary Chinese society.

The BBC’s China 2

Another excerpt from the article I wrote from this seminar on the BBC’s “China Week”.

As noted above, the BBC appeared to “misrecognize” its own participation in China’s discursive production, so that it offered a self-conscious interpretation of China for the British public while simultaneously deploying the media’s conventional rhetorical effects of objectivity. This epistemological confusion suggests a failure by the BBC to self-reflexively understand the nature of its self-ascribed institutional task in China Week. It wished to help the British public “know the world’s fastest growing superpower”, but it did not understand its own role in producing “China” as a bounded and structured body of knowledge. It self-consciously interpreted China through several layers of mediation, but did not appear to recognize the operation of its own interpretive effects.

In this way, China Week was not a creative and sustained intellectual act. Instead, the BBC unreflectively deployed an appropriated array of valorized themes and ideas with which “China” was described, explained, and understood. It created these as an improvised and porous discourse functioning as just a part of the broad Western discourse of China. China Week was an assemblage or summation of a range of ideas of China, packaged into radio and television reportage.

The improvised nature of China Week was evidenced in its unmindful retelling of the long engagement of the West with China. This engagement could be found in references made by China Week to earlier representational tropes. One of the most febrile is the apocryphal phrase of Napoleon’s “Beware the sleeping dragon for when she awakes she will shake the world”. While Napoleon never actually made any reference to a waking dragon,¹ it has become one of the longest-standing references to a temporalized China, expressing China’s modernity and modernization around the notion of its emergence from an ahistorical past.

In China Week, there were only two scripted references to China as a waking dragon, one which opened the entire week of broadcasting on the Breakfast television program and another during the news cycle on the 24 hour digital news channel BBC News 24, into which China Week reports were inserted at regular intervals. However, if this cliché has faded, the BBC introduced a new phrase to describe China, “the world’s fastest growing economy” which opened almost every segment, report and program like a mantra. This phrase became the primary rhetorical device for China Week to legitimize China as a place which should most interest and concern the British public. For the BBC, China’s defining and important characteristic is its economy and its current high rate of economic growth, rather than, as a hypothetical contrast, its ancient and magnificent civilization. That this specific measurement of global power – annual rates of economic growth – should define the meaning of China for the BBC is an expression of its implication in the global liberal capitalist narratives in which economic statistics have become the key structuring principle for global meaning.

China Week also echoed the 19th and early 20th century tropes of China of the “Mysterious East” and “Yellow Peril”. Introducing China Week on Radio Five Live, the presenter said: “China has emerged as the new global superpower with the world’s fastest growing economy, but what do we know about this country?” (BBC Five Live, 7 March 2005) The answer is, of course, perhaps more than any other non-western country in the world. China is after all it’s own field of scholarship. Similarly with current affairs program Newsnight a scripted introduction ran as follows: “This question of how the world’s fastest growing economy can simultaneously be the world’s biggest Communist state is one of the great mysteries about China.” (Newsnight, 9 March, 2005). China is politically authoritarian and economically liberal, of which one can find any number of examples, especially in East Asia through the 20th century. The “mystery” is not a general politico-economic analytical problem, but “China” itself. That mystery was evoked in the rhetorical style of the presentation, with the presenter’s tone of voice functioning as a metaphorical gazing to the distant horizons of the Far East.

BBC China Week also referred to more recent meanings for China. In the introductions to some of the television segments the BBC claimed it had particular access to China:

In a country balancing its Communist ideals against the desire to throw open its borders to foreign investment … the BBC has been given unprecedented access but free broadcasting on many issues is still restricted. BBC News 24, 7 March 2005

The notion of “unprecedented access” references Maoist China, when traveling to and moving around China was, indeed, much more difficult than it is today, and it invokes a special claim on knowledge of China as a legitimizing strategy for the BBC’s China discourse.

In contrast to these traditional orientalist notions of China, China Week also made references to the Chinese diaspora. During the Breakfast program, in a report on the Chinese community in the northern city of Manchester, a journalist did a live broadcast from a large Chinese grocery supplier:

Good morning everyone from Manchester. We’re here as part of the BBC’s China Week, looking at the business links between the UK, and between the north west, and China. … The store that we’re in … is a cash-and-carry store that supplies Chinese restaurants … and you’ve got anything you could ever want … and of course the ubiquitous fortune cookies. BBC 1, Breakfast, 8 March, 2005

Pointing out the fortune cookies acknowledges the overseas Chinese migrant, mainly Cantonese, communities in the UK. This is an historically-specific meaning for China from the 19th and 20th centuries, when Chinese migrants settled in the UK and established Chinatowns and businesses in food and services. This is a very different understanding of China from that of the “People’s Republic of China” and decades older than the notion of “the world’s fastest growing superpower”. These references to the many meanings for China point to the ad hoc nature of China Week. They were not offered as part of a deliberate exposition of the history of the West’s engagement with China or Chinese people, but were included as the unreflective reproduction of discourses, and perhaps even stereotypes.

However, within this process of discursive reproduction, the BBC did present a dominant meaning for China, and that was the notion of “transformation”. Almost every report was prefaced and structured around the idea of China making some kind of social, civilizational and, of course, economic leap from one state to another.²

Western ideas of transformation in Asia are long-established. The model is the West’s reading of Japan after the Meiji Restoration and the period between 1868 and Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.³ Notions of East Asian transformation were renewed in the post-war period with Taiwan and South Korea, the so-called “Little Dragons”.⁴ The over-determining narrative is modernization and, more fundamentally, modernity, and as with these earlier expressions of Asian modernity, the transformation narrative of China Week became an uncritical telling of a story of China’s transition to a “modern” society. This in turn reproduced a range of unstated assumptions about the “unmodern” point of origin in China’s past from which such a transformation could begin, and the features and styles by which we could recognize that this is a “new China”.

The markers of transformation for such an uncritical narrative in China Week were delimited. The unmodern was broadly represented by China’s rural poor and the modern by the urban rich. China Week temporalized the relationship between the two so as to present urbanization as a feature of an “emergence” or “rise” of China. It used a doubled structure in a number of its reports to show this transition: the poverty of rural life was contrasted with a modern urban life in Beijing and especially Shanghai:

[video of rural village, pig being prepared for slaughter] The way things are done here hasn’t changed for centuries. The man of the house should be in charge, but Mrs Xiang’s had to hire in some help. Her son is a student at college. Killing pigs is not his business. And her husband’s far from home, earning money to pay for the university fees. … [video of modern urban hair salon] … Eight hundred miles away in Shanghai, Gaohui is giving herself a very different kind of treat, a little pampering at the hairdressers. BBC News 24, 9 March 2005.

Often, though, the transformation narrative was presented with start and end points which were implicit rather than stated in such an obvious way. When the presenter said “but economic liberation has not yet been followed by political freedom”, a received set of suppositions about the nature of social progress was put in place: China’s transformation is indicated by the creation of particular kind of free-market liberal economic regime, and modern China starts with the creation of this regime. Then, the transformation of its economy sets in place other necessary developments, in particular political and social freedom, leading China theoretically toward an imagined liberal democratic future.⁵ This narrative leaves assumed the point when China’s path to modernity, or industrialization began, and where it is going:

[Journalist] “Well, we used to have bicycles, now we have mopeds, hopefully we’ll soon have cars,” he said. China’s following a well-trodden path. Korea, Japan and others have industrialized rapidly, and all the evidence is that if China’s come a long way, it can still go a lot further. BBC News 24, 12 March 2005.

In China Week, little of this was made explicit, and as noted above, these issues of how to understand China were not self-reflexively included in the broadcasts. Rather than interrogate what makes China look “new”, China’s modernity was identified and presented in a received form recognizable to both the British audience and the BBC. It was envisioned most strongly by a familiar consumer culture, urbanization and modern architecture, signified by Chinese people participating in China’s consumer boom, for example in modern houses, shopping malls, cars and roads, and again and again with the illuminated vista of the Lujiazui financial district of the Pudong New Area in Shanghai.

These recognizable signs of the “new China” established reference points with which Chinese history and futures could be known by a British audience, and through which a British audience could also know itself. If China is transforming, then Britain is transformed, at the end of this imagined future for China, waiting for China to catch up, or even overtake the UK. The structured nature of this version of China’s path to modernity overshadowed other aspects of China’s modernization, ones less recognizable to the BBC and to a British audience. In particular, with notable exceptions such as the story on the Three Gorges Dam project, state-sponsored modernization was not a feature of China Week, largely excluding the potent state and Party visions for China’s future around nationalist ideology, the military, infrastructure or the space program. China’s transformation in China Week was generally showing the emergence of the individuated urban consumer as the sign of the arrival of this “new China”:

[Journalist] I am walking along one of Shanghai’s most fashionable shopping streets, Huahai Rd in the centre of the city and it is lined with exactly the same trade names that you would see in any major Western city. There’s a Pierre Cardin, Adidas, Mango, across the road, Episode, Armani, they’re all here, and they’re all catering to the new rich of Shanghai. BBC Radio 4, The World Today, 9 March, 2005.

More fundamental than these elisions, the narrative of transformation is redolent with politics and the politics of history-writing. By structuring their knowledge of China in terms of transformation, the BBC was actually engaged in the practice of writing Chinese history itself. The transformation of the “New China” involves trajectories with an imagined historical starting point, and imagined end-points, which introduces effacements and erasures into its historical narratives.

For China Week, the starting point for China’s transformation into “the world’s fastest growing economy” was very clearly 1978 and the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, when the Chinese Communist Party initiated “reform”: the Open Door policy, economic liberalization, and the continued dismantling of collectivized (though not state-owned) agriculture and industry. In terms of the politics of history-writing, if China “began” its transformation in 1978 then this serves to attenuate and marginalize what came before, in this case Maoism. By starting the history of the new China in 1978, Maoist China becomes merely a point of origin, a singular moment with no history of its own and, in particular, no continuity with the China of the 1930s and 1940s and the contemporary China of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. By structuring it around a narrative of transformation based on economic growth, the version of Chinese history of China Week erased Maoism from Chinese history.

In one of the live crosses to Shanghai across from the Pudong New Area, this erasure was clearly expressed:

[Journalist] Hello and welcome to Shanghai, and I am on the Bund, Shanghai’s famous waterfront … Take a look over there, that skyline seventy years ago the most famous in Asia. In those days Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East, and now many people hope that those glory days are coming back again. You look over the river [pan to Pudong New Area] and you see some of the reasons why. Ten years ago that was marshland … BBC News 24, 7 March 2005.

In this introduction was a history of China in which Mao and Maoist Communism became a void, an absent presence, around which Shanghai had deviated away from its “natural” status of “glory”.

It is notable that the narrative of transformation articulated by much of the reportage of China Week was the use of extreme contrasts – extreme poverty, the people “left behind”, the “have-nots” in contrast to the urban rich in the major cities. This attenuated the possibility of invoking the idea of “ordinary Chinese”, people neither especially rich nor poor and people whose lives express neither the timelessness of the peasant nor the emergence from 1978 of the rich consumer, but rather greater continuity in their lives over the last few decades that the notion of transformation would tend to acknowledge. Similarly with the attenuation of the state and the Party from China Week, which while still controlling most of the economy and being an active presence in Chinese lives, does not fit within the transformation narrative and a history of China that starts in 1978.

If the BBC has written a history of China that starts in 1978, then the question becomes what are the implications of a such a specific and politicized history. The danger for the BBC is that in writing Chinese history in this way, and being apparently unaware of the implications of its own history-writing, or even that it was engaged in such a task, it finds itself aligned with a common story about China being told by government and business that privileges economic development and commercial opportunities and attenuates the both the continuing presence of the Communist state, and the complexity and continuities of China’s social experience as a narrative of change over the whole post-imperial period. Importantly, this is a version of China’s story that the Chinese government itself is also telling, as it distances itself from Maoism and encourages China’s consumer economy, while continuing to secure its position of political authority.

The history of China which the BBC was reproducing was told during China Week itself by a representative of the British business community on a panel discussion program on Radio 4:

[Program guest] I think we have to get the big picture here. China’s economic miracle over the last twenty five years in an event of historical proportions. Four hundred, five hundred million people have been brought out of poverty over that period. We are looking at rates of growth going forward of eight, nine percent in the next ten years. No other developing country is looking at that future at the moment. All these problems, the banking sector, maybe a small housing price bubble in Shanghai, which of course is only one city among hundreds of cities, these problems are manageable if growth keeps going, even the environmental problems, we know … once a certain level of per capita income is achieved these start to be solved much more quickly. It’s a question of industrialization which China is going through right at the moment. BBC Radio 4, The World Today, 11 March 2005.

In understanding the implementation of economic reform by the Chinese Communist Party as a “miracle” and “an event of historical proportions”, a specific set of policies are read as China’s transition to modernity starting twenty-five years ago. The narrative deprecates China’s previous experiences of modernity and the continuities across the 20th century of both its economic development and especially its politics. Furthermore, it imagines a distinctly old-fashioned, and perhaps reassuring, Western modernist vision of limitless progress through modernization, in which all of China’s problems will be solved by capitalist industrialization. The BBC was deeply engaged with this way of understanding China and has reproduced it very thoroughly in China Week.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Humphrys, J. (2005). Objectivity is our lifeblood. The Guardian, 9 September 2005, 14

Tuchman, G. (1972). Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of the Newsmen’s Notion of Objectivity. The American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 77, No. 4. 660-679.

Allen, S. (1999) News Culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Budner S., and Krauss, E. S. (1995). Newspaper Coverage of U.S.-Japan Frictions: Balance and Objectivity. Asian Survey. Vol. 35, No.4. 336-356.

¹ John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: politics, culture and class in the Nationalist

revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 62-63.

² see John Fitzgerald, Awakening China, ibid., for a detailed exposition of the history of the transformation trope from the 19th century to the early 20th century.

³ Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America,” The Atlantic Monthly Vol.118, No.1 (July 1916): 88.

⁴ Ezra F. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1991), 18

⁵ See Samuel P. Huntington, “How Countries Democratize,” Political Science

Quarterly Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter 1991-1992): 579-616 for a version of this theory, and also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Avon Books, 1992)

⁶ ibid.

The BBC’s China 1

I finally got around to writing up this seminar on the BBC’s “China Week” into a paper for publication. Here’s an excerpt.

The location of China Week within the rhetorical styles of conventional broadcasting and news reporting without actually being news exposes the discursive structure of those styles very neatly. It expresses a powerful effect of misrecognition by the BBC,¹ in which China Week was offered as a deliberate and self-conscious interpretive and pedagogical approach to China while presenting its broadcasts as if they functioned on the conventional bases of the notions of objectivity and neutrality which inform broadcasting and news reporting. China Week, therefore, invoked an ambiguous form of broadcasting, with the conventions of journalistic objectivity coming up against a self-conscious narration of a discourse of “China”.

Objectivity is as established an orthodoxy in the media as it is a dominant theme of critique in media studies. The self-professed purpose of journalism is to report “facts”, on the assumption that they can be understood as objective truths and conveyed with disinterest on the part of the journalist or broadcaster,² what Gaye Tuchman described in the early 1970s as the “strategic ritual” of objectivity.³ The history of the journalistic notion of objectivity has been thoroughly detailed in media studies⁴ and there are also parallels with the development of the notion of objectivity in the social sciences. Although contemporary news reporting may often self-consciously not heed the ideal of objectivity, the ideal itself remains a powerful legitimizing regime over the work of the media.

In the case of China Week, the BBC’s aim was to inform the British public as to the nature of China: “what life in China in 2005 is really like” (Asia Today, BBC News 24, 10 March, 2005). The BBC’s reports and broadcasts were all constructed on the basis of the powerful credibility the BBC holds as a global broadcaster as a producer of authoritative, informed, objective and balanced news and broadcasting.

In media and television studies, the critique of objectivity has rested on the notion of ideology, so that far from delivering objective truth, the media’s representation of events and subjects is understood as expressing particular ideologies through bias and omission.⁵ News reporting is criticized for expressing the interests of power, especially around social categories such as class, race, gender and the state and corporate power rather than upholding its avowed ideals. Early forms of critical and Marxist-inflected television studies such as that of the Glasgow Media Group exemplify this approach.⁶ This kind of work unpacks the relationship between the content and rhetorical conventions of news presentations so as to denaturalize them, showing how objectivity is merely a stylistic device, an authoritative, neutral presenting style for the reporting of events which effaces editorial political choices and biases, presenting news information as if the television production and editorial process was not introducing a wide range of ideological distortions.

Following media studies, needless to say the BBC’s presentation of China is open to a wide-ranging possible critique of its content and rhetoric. The non-news news of China Week was redolent with strong editorial decisions which delivered a proscribed range of themes and ideas about China through particular emphases or omissions, all of which showed China in a specific way. China Week might also be open to criticism for its occasional deployment of stereotypes and clichés about China and Chinese people.

Yet the traditional media studies critique of news reporting is predicated on the assumption that an objective idealized truth is in fact possible. This may be a less significant issue when, in the example of the Glasgow Media Group work the critical goal is necessarily also a political one, but in the context of broadcasting about China, this issue is more germane. A critique of China Week which aimed to show how it was ideologically biased assumes that there is a single truthful or correct understanding of “China” against which the BBC’s could be measured. This critique, therefore, makes a counter-appeal to a totalizing knowledge of the true nature of China, from which the BBC is accused of deviating with inaccuracies and omissions.

Rather than set up completing claims to know the “real” China in a critical response to China Week, the Week can be simply described on the basis of its claim on knowledge of China. At the level of epistemology, rather than rhetorical style, objectivity is a more fundamental feature of media reporting, becoming, in this broader sense, positivism, or an understanding of language which assumes the possibility of producing empirical knowledge of social categories which is independent of the structuring effect of the language that is used to express that knowledge.⁷ China Week was informed by the assumption that “China” is a bounded and totalizable reality, a singular social object which can be accurately reported, described and analyzed on the basis of a clear distinction between China as a social object and the media coverage that is producing an understanding of what China is.

Therefore, out of contemporary China’s pluralities and untotalizable realities, the BBC was producing its own coherent version of China. It was elaborated like those of academia or politics, with styles and registers which produced legitimate knowledge – knowledge that counts as knowledge – through specific epistemological mechanisms. It was structured in terms of temporality and had valorized themes. China Week shows how the BBC was engaged in an act to produce China as a discourse, the BBC’s China.

The breadth of China Week across the BBC was one of its unusual and defining features, giving its discursive production a scale not apparent in the more normal discontiguous individual news reports. It became, deliberately or otherwise, an institutional undertaking which produced different aspects of the BBC’s China across the different networks, taking on a multiplicity of legitimizing mechanisms. The networks and stations were operating within their different briefs to produce different kinds of knowledge, but which together offered the possibility of an encompassing knowledge.

The discursive production of China by China Week began with the introductions to the segments. In the context of the non-news news characteristic of the Week, these functioned as an explicit interpretive layer, constructing a delimited set of problematics and themes from which the British public could “know”, and know that it knew, China. On the 6 O’clock News, the newsreader said:

All this week, the BBC has been taking a closer look at China. It’s the world’s fastest growing economy and this year will overtake Britain. But economic liberation has not yet been followed by political freedom. In the first of a series of special reports for the 6 O’Clock News… (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 8 March 2005).

This week we’ve reported on how much China has changed in recent years, but there’s been little reform in one area – religion. Today, religious minorities are still closely controlled. (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 10 March 2005).

Like the other aspects of China Week, the introductions are part of the rhetorical strategies which began the process of legitimizing the BBC’s authorial voice. They were mediating between an imagined “British public”, which was assumed, possibly correctly, to be largely ignorant about China, and the reportage segments on television and radio.

After the introductions, the different networks of the BBC produced their distinct ways of knowing China. Analogies can be drawn between the kinds of coverage across the BBC and the different approaches possible from within academic knowledge of China. One can map China Week across academic models: Radio Five Live was doing ethnography or anthropology, taking in local, “ordinary” experiences; similarly on TV, BBC News 24 and BBC Breakfast were doing live crosses and talking to people in the street. This kind of knowledge was legitimized, like anthropology, by claims on an authentic, subjective Chinese experience – the personal voices of real Chinese people – as the site at which we can know China. In contrast, the Radio 4 spoken word network, the evening television news programs and the nightly Newsnight current affairs program, and some of the World Service were doing political science, sociology or policy analysis – broader studies of political and social processes in China. Instead of the personal and subjective, this was the systematizing effect of abstract analyses, outlining themes and offering explanatory models from which it could be claimed to know China. The interviews and “vox-pops” provide “data” which offers representative samples of Chinese lives, and the analysis and in-depth constructed reports function as “theory” to make sense of the “data”.

Radio Five Live spent a morning in a small town called Huiwu south of Chongqing, visiting a school and presenting descriptive knowledge:

In the background you can probably hear some children, they’re primary school children, exercising in what is their only area to exercise, a sort of rather scruffy playground … it’s … it’s pretty poor. I am looking at a three story building, it’s got the sort of white cement on the outside which is rough and in some places falling off…” (Radio Five Live, 11 March, 2005).

BBC News 24 crossed live to Shanghai where the journalist interviewed a representative example of urban China:

[Journalist] Cheng Yun, who’s 25, and she works for L’Oreal, the cosmetics giant. Cheng Yun, what’s it like to live in this city? [Interviewee] Oh, it’s very nice, I like [it] here, it’s a very dynamic city, and a lot of opportunities. … [Journalist] And you’ve come down here to do a bit of shopping here this evening. [Interviewee] Yes!(BBC News 24, 7 March, 2005).

Although these “vox-pops” might have been analogous to ethnographic knowledge, the epistemologies of electronic news are quite specific and distinctive from academic knowledge. A social scientist might survey a large number of people or analyze statistics to produce knowledge while surveys or qualitative research with a single subject would not count or be legitimate. For journalism, a single interviewee is legitimate, and this rests on both the assumption that they are representative of a broader objective social reality “China’s rural poor”, or “urban Chinese youth”, for example, and also that they themselves can offer analysis of that social reality.⁸ This is an improvisational epistemological mechanism in which the journalist uses his or her judgment, a “nose” for news, with which to assess the assumed representiveness of an interviewee.

For Newsnight, the 6 O’Clock News, and some of the segments on BBC News 24 and on radio, their contribution to China Week was extended analytical reports on topics including politics, the environment, the economy, human rights and daily life. In contrast to the improvisational and subjective “data” of the live coverage, these reports were detailed and structured with lines of argumentation:

[Journalist] Over the past two decades, China has put economic growth above all else, and with two hundred million Chinese still living on less than a dollar a day, relieving poverty remains vital. Coal offers the way out. As the demand for power grows, for the time being this means one thing, more emissions of climate changing gasses (BBC2 Newsnight, 8 March 2005).

These kinds of reports also use the convention of the “expert”, an academic or a government official for example, whose analysis is legitimized by the institutions of academia or by political power:

[Journalist] But China’s international reputation is now a mixed affair. [Expert interviewee 1] China is a partner in the fight against global international terrorism, and I think that’s won China some point in America and around the world … [Journalist] When it comes to proliferation, there is one area, North Korea, where China has made itself essential … [Expert interviewee 2] They have absolutely no desire to see a nuclear North Korea. (BBC News 24, 9 March, 2005).

Typically, news reporting offers a combination of the journalist’s analytic voice, perhaps with the legitimizing addition of the expert, and the subjective interviewee. On the Newsnight program under the subject of democracy:

[Journalist] This week, China announced it’s achieved ninety-nine percent democracy. In Tianjin, the mayor is trying to breath life into consultative bodies that used to simply rubber-stamp party decisions. … [Interview with street vendor, journalist] Do you think politicians in this city actually listen when people like you ask them things? [Interviewee] You mean the leaders? I feel from my point of view it’s not likely, because we’re not important, we’re too small and too far way from people with their social status.” (BBC2 Newsnight, 9 March, 2005).

In one example, knowledge of China was produced self-reflexively, by asking how much British people knew about China. The lighter magazine style of the Breakfast television program meant it self-reflexively includes the viewer, an imagined “ordinary” member of the British public, into its discursive production of China:

[Host] It produces half of the world’s cameras, a quarter of its washing machines, and ninety percent of the world’s toys. We’re talking about China’s economy which is expanding all the time. … [Interview subject] ‘This definitely says Made in China … [Interview with British woman, journalist] Jo, we’ve looked around your house, are you surprised by the number of products that are made in China?” (BBC1 Breakfast, 8 March 2005).

For television, unlike radio, or indeed academic knowledge, visuality is the basis of the legitimacy of its knowledge. In China Week, visuality functions as an analogue of its whole epistemology. Television coverage showed images of Chinese lives in which their visual presentation produces the effect of unmediated objective knowledge and which effaces the mediative processes of television production. As Stein has argued in the context of the US current affairs program 60 Minutes, following from Barthes’ critique of the news photograph, the visual representation of China in China Week is a privileged form of knowledge, unarguable as the “real China”. When we see something on television, we really know that we know it. The visual “in this medium professes to be a ‘mechanical analogue of reality.’ … [its] denotative status and the completeness of its analogy, ‘in short its ‘objectivity’,’ lends itself to the naturalized state of ideological common-sense”.⁹ The power of the image is such that it functions to produce China as an objective reality, powerful enough to overwhelm our awareness of the wholly constructed nature of the image by the television production processes.

An example of the power of the visual in China Week was a report on the Three Gorges Dam, under the theme “Environment”. A long shot took in the enormous scale of the Three Gorges Dam project, showing the viewer the reality of China’s promethean development and, in the context of the report, the costs to the environment. Then, however, the journalist intervenes, shown in a shot standing on top of a platform so as to survey the construction project. he adopts a literal privileged position from which to “know” China, and mediate between the “real” China of the image and the British viewer. From this position, the journalist explains the significance of the Three Gorges project:

When this dam is finished, it will be by some margin, the world’s largest hydroelectric powerstation … for the Chinese government, that’s obviously very good news, that will be cheap, clean electricity for China’s surging economy. But there is another side to the story of this dam, and that is its immense cost…” (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 9 March, 2005).

Television’s visuality appeals with unique power to the possibility of unmediated objectivity, in contrast to radio which by definition makes explicit the mediative effects of the reporter on the reality he or she is reporting. Radio in this way demands both creative imagination on the part of the listener to “picture”, for example, the impoverished Huiwu school and a recognition of the interpretive role of the aural radio medium. In denoting the demand of the listener that he or she “picture” China’s reality, radio makes explicit the mediative and constructive mechanisms which television works equally explicitly to conceal.

¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 163.

² John Humphrys, “Objectivity is our lifeblood”, The Guardian, 9 September 2005, 14.

³ Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of the Newsmen’s Notion of Objectivity,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 4 (January 1972), 660.

⁴ see, for example, Stuart Allen, News Culture, (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999)

⁵ see, for example, Stanley Budner and Ellis S. Krauss, “Newspaper Coverage of U.S.-Japan Frictions: Balance and Objectivity,” Asian Survey, Vol. 35, No.4 (April, 1995),3 36-356.

⁶ The Glasgow Media Group, “Bad News,” Theory and Society, Vol. 3, No. 3, (Autumn, 1976), 339-363.

⁷ Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 130.

⁸ Stuart Allen, News Culture, (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999), 36-39.

⁹ Sarah R. Stein, “Legitimating TV Journalism in 60 Minutes: The Ramifications of Subordinating the Visual to the Primacy of the Word,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 18, No. 3, (September 2001), 251.

Television in China 2

And the rest. Some of this material was published in a chapter in the RoutledgeCurzon volume, “Media In China: Consumption, content and crisis”.

The national broadcaster

As the national broadcaster, CCTV delivers eight channels of programming, each with a particular focus, although there is a certain amount of cross-programming. Channel 1 is news and general interest; 2, general and financial; 3, music; 4 is the international service; 5, sport; 6, movies and drama; 7, children’s programming, science, military and agricultural; 8, art and drama, and a ninth is the English language service (Yan 2000, 514). Of all television broadcasters in China, CCTV is the most at the service of the political and social conservatism within the Chinese political establishment. Broadcasts on CCTV include educational programs for rural viewers and a large number of documentaries and programs on art and science. Its music programming covers Canto and Taiwan pop, but also Peking opera broadcasts, including ‘Opening the Door to the Arts: Learning to Sing Peking Opera’. The international service has a regular program entitled ‘The Bright Light of Chinese Arts’ (China Central Television 2000).

Flor Cruz (1999) has commented on the emergence of critical programming on CCTV since the mid-1990s, such as the current affairs programs Dongfang Shikong (Eastern Scope) and Jiaodian Fantan (Topic of Focus) (Yan 2000, 514). These programs cover social issues such as corruption, health and the environment as well as interviews and vox pops. However, although the national current affairs programs offer a voice outside of pure party propaganda, they nonetheless stay within the limits of political conservatism as it is practiced in China. In exposing corrupt government officials and the social ills of the free market, they can be understood as part of the national process of managing China’s transition to a market economy without undermining the power of China’s political establishment.

CCTV connects to global media through a range of foreign programming from the US and Japanese television dramas and movies, and a certain amount of Hong Kong television and movies and some from Taiwan. US television networks have been using program exchange arrangements to supply American productions in exchange for advertising time since the mid-1980s, while Hong Kong and Taiwanese producers have long been providing movies and pseudo-historical soap operas such as Judge Bao. Also often overlooked as a major contributor to global media in China is the sports network CCTV5, which apart from sports magazine and home exercise programs, broadcasts up to three hours of basketball, including coverage of the American NBA, and three to four hours of international soccer each day (China Central Television 2000)

Commercialized Television

Below CCTV is a large number of free-to-air and cable operators at the provincial, city and county levels that by virtue of their relative distance from central administration have pursued commercialisation more aggressively than CCTV. Economically and culturally, the three most powerful sub-national broadcasters are Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Each draws on a media language created in Hong Kong and Taiwan that presents a particular form of consumerism and modernity in Chinese culture. In this way, the regional networks are the prime conduit for Chinese culture from the global Chinese diaspora and global culture generally.

Operating administratively at the city level, one of the most important broadcasters in China is Shanghai Television, which provides two channels of mixed popular programming, including news, drama, sport, children’s, and lifestyle programs (Shanghai Television 2000a ). Its news programming covers general as well as a notable amount of specialist financial and economic news, and a short international news headlines segment. Drama is a mix of pseudo-historical, and modern soap operas, including in mid-2000 an adaptation of the folk story Mulan, and a ‘Miami Vice’-style police action series (Shanghai Television 2000b). It also carries a significant amount of foreign programming, such as the daily American magazine program ‘Entertainment Tonight’, which is repackaged for China largely unchanged except for a different name (Jinri Yingshi ‘Movies and Television Today’) subtitling and Chinese graphics. Recently, the American production company, the Children’s Television Workshop has franchised a local version of the children’s program ‘Sesame Street’ to STV (Keane 2000).

Shanghai Television also broadcasts its own current affairs programs which deal with social issues. However, in accordance with the market imperative, STV positions itself as a broadcaster responsive to the interests of the people of Shanghai. Like all regional and local operators, Shanghai Television is required to carry some CCTV material, including national news and propaganda programming like Xiandai Junshi (Contemporary Soldier). However, the overall tone of large successful regional television broadcasters like Shanghai Television is populist, personalistic, and fashion-driven. Its programming is focussed on creating a personal connection with viewers to maintain a regular audience by using continuing character-driven drama serials, populist current affairs, and a star system, for example He Jing, the host of ‘Join Us Talking’. Furthermore, it generates an aspirational consumerism through global and local brand-exposure, and the presentation of a desirable lifestyle in programming and advertising. But like market-driven television broadcasters outside of China, the promotion of a consumer culture can sit relatively easily within a conservative political regime. Therefore, the exposure of a corrupt bureaucrat on a populist current affairs program can serve both the marketeer’s need for an audience’s emotional reaction and the government’s need for justice to be seen to be done by the people.

Although above them administratively, the larger provincial free-to-air broadcasters follow the city-based commercial leaders like Shanghai TV in creating their media style. Typical of an important provincial broadcaster is Heilongjiang Television, which began transmission in 1958, as China’s third broadcasting network after Beijing and Shanghai. HLJTV broadcasts thirty six hours of programming per day on two channels, but like a number of major city and provincial broadcasters, Heilongjiang Television began a satellite service at the end of 1997 on Asiasat 1, and claims access to fifty countries in Asia and the Pacific (Heilongjiang Television 2000a). Heilongjiang Television transmits a range of programming including news, drama and sport. A major component of its content is regular drama series, with a mixture of historical and modern, aspirational dramas. These include the contemporary Xinwen Xiaojie (News Girl), which is run throughout China on free-to-air and cable networks (Heilongjiang Television 2000b).

Cable broadcasters also operate at the provincial level in China. A large provincial-level cable television provider is Jiangsu Cable Television, which while not releasing total viewer figures, claims peaks of 42% of available sets (Jiangsu Cable Television 2000a). JSCTV runs two channels with the familiar mix of programming and is part of a media company that includes a monthly current affairs magazine, a daily newspaper, and an internet site (Jiangsu Cable Television 2000b). JSCTV is sufficiently large, however, to produce its own programming, notably a television spin-off of its print magazine. JSCTV sells advertising on its television networks for up to 13000 yuan (AUD935) for a thirty second spot during its peak viewing periods (Jiangsu Cable Television 2000c).

Further down the hierarchy from the big city and provincial operators are numerous free-to-air and cable city and county television stations throughout China. For example, Baoding Television, a free-to-air city broadcaster in Hebei province, transmits on two channels, which it calls ‘news’ and ‘economic’. Both channels run a mix of programming, however its ‘economic’ channel is a product of the 1983 television industry reforms, allowing networks to operate on a commercial basis, while the ‘news’ channel is a legacy of the state-run system of broadcasting. Baoding Television sells advertising time, but unlike the premium costs of Jiangsu Cable Television, it charges between 1400 (AUD100) and 4800 yuan (AUD345) per thirty second spot, with its most expensive time during the first twenty minutes of its multi-part drama series (Baoding Television, 2000).

Also on a small scale is a combined free-to-air and cable network in Dandong, in Liaoning Province in China’s far northeast. Starting as a free-to-air television station in 1960 and as a cable station in 1992, the two combined into a single television provider in 1994. The free-to-air service covers 1.4 million people in the Dandong City area, while the cable service has 80000 homes subscribing (Dandong Television and Dandong Cable Television 2000a). The two delivery systems provide complementary services, with one free-to-air channel broadcasting news and current affairs as well as government ‘announcements’, and the cable channels broadcasting ‘lifestyle’ and drama series respectively. Even at the county level DDTV is producing local news bulletin, a current affairs program called ‘Investigative Journalist’, as well as its own sports and arts programs which are cross-broadcast on the free-to-air and cable services.

As a small city-level broadcaster, Dandong Television represents a useful example of television as it received in the homes of a significant number of Chinese. From the coverage figures offered by DDTV, one could estimate that one third to one half of viewers in Dandong City would have a cable service. Those without receive a limited number of free-to-air channels: DDTV1, the two Liaoning Province free-to-air channels and some CCTV broadcasts. Those with cable subscriptions receive a total of eighteen channels: three from DDTV as well as seven of the eight CCTV channels, four provincial channels – two each from Liaoning Cable TV and Liaoning TV as well as various feeds from other provincial broadcasters, including Guangdong Provincial Television (Dandong Television and Dandong Cable Television 2000b). Therefore, television reception presents a social hierarchy of availability, with households with cable having access to more television signals and particularly more from outside of their home province. Significantly, however, although the availability of channels may present a hierarchy, with the exception of local news and current affairs the actual programming varies little from area to area. All stations broadcast a similar mix of drama, news and sport, obtained from different sources, and CCTV propaganda.

Television in China continues to develop at a rapid pace. A new company formed in 1999 by SARFT and a number provincial cable operators, called the China Cable TV Network (Group) Co aims to consolidate major cable networks into a national cable system. Furthermore, impending deregulation of the telephone industry is opening the possibility for broadband communications services to be provided over cable networks. Particularly at the city and provincial level, local administrators have been encouraging telephone, cable and internet providers to form alliances for combined services to avoid duplication of network infrastructure (Rothman and Barker 1999). Needless to say, however, for the vast majority of Chinese, such advanced services are still many years away.

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